Disney-Britton

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Barnaby Barford’s “The Tree” (2019) in the exhibition “MORE, MORE, MORE” Barnaby Barford is obsessed with words and with The Apple, and uses them to explore fundamental questions driving human nature. During Ernest’s heel healing journey, he has looked to artists like Barnaby for inspiration. Barnaby’s work is informed by mythology, art history and religious symbolism. He sees the Apple as a symbol of immortality, death and beauty, innocence and experience, sin and redemption. Barnaby Barford’s latest body of work on The Apple is now on view at London's David Gill Gallery . That makes Barnaby Barford our artist of the week .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Andy Warhol, The Last Supper , 1982-84  Pop artist Andy Warhol was the religious art master, and a new show coming this Fall that will explore his Christian faith. Andy Warhol's "The Last Supper" is part of a final painting series of works based on Leonardo’s Renaissance masterpiece. Executed near the end of Andy Warhol's life, the monumental piece which takes up the themes of religion and loss that were so key to Warhol's  work. This past weekend, Ernest and I went on a couple's retreat sponsored by our church where we explored the key themes of our life together. Such exploration makes Andy Warhol, our religious artist of the week.

NEWCITY By Alan Pocaro Tom Torluemke, “Sickly Decline,” 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 78.25 x 136.5 inches: an eleven-foot spiritual and scatological descendant of Belgian painter James Ensor’s razor-sharp brush. Tom Torluemke is one of Chicago’s most gifted contemporary artists. “ Born in the USA ” at One After 909 is his latest foray in a series of “the end is nigh”-style visual homilies addressed to a wayward flock, and his best yet. Like the works in previous exhibitions, the paintings in “Born in the USA” are both a reflection of contemporary political events and a dire prediction of the future. Where this show differs from earlier efforts is in the complexity of the visual statement.  “Born in the USA” is the perfect antidote for those who’ve soured on the milquetoast abstraction that routinely leaks from the bloated walls of the city’s art programs. [ More ]

THE SUN SENTINEL By SERGIO CARMONA Artist Steve Marcus' work is now on display at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. (WorldRedEye/Courtesy) With the theme for this year’s Jewish American Heritage Month being Jewish illustrators, the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU will commemorate the celebratory month by presenting a program featuring internationally acclaimed New York-based artist Steve Marcus on May 19. The upcoming program is part of his exhibit “Through the Hat: The Art of Steve Marcus,” which is currently running at the museum through May 21 and includes more than 26 wood carved sculptures and Jewish ritual objects, more than a dozen hand drawn works of art on paper and custom synagogue furniture.[ More ]

SHRINE Nate Plotkin, Good Vibes, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 30" x 36" Breaking Idols is a vibrant exploration of the joys, hardships and beautiful mystery of life in our current times. Nate Plotkin takes a deep dive into the multitude of issues surrounding us all: Am I brave enough to protect those I love? How do I make sense of what is magic and unexplainable in life? Can love survive when the world around us seems to fall apart? Do I make my own destiny? Nate Plotkin, and his wife Johanna, are the primary protagonists exploring these questions in his new series of paintings. While the personal resemblance is sometimes clear, the couple most often morphs into a symbolic HE and SHE. They appear in different forms and at different points in life, but in all of the works Nate is portraying his love for his wife, and also for life itself. "Nate Plotkin: Breaking Idols" at Shrine gallery runs through June 2, 2019. [ More ]

PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW By Mary Pickles Andy Warhol (1928-1987) Last Supper The Andy Warhol Museum is celebrating its silver anniversary today, with plans to mark the 25th anniversary of its May 13, 1994, opening at 117 Sandusky St. on Pittsburgh’s North Side with several special events this year and next. Later this year, Oct. 20-Feb. 16, 2020, the Pittsburgh museum will offer visitors “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” According to the museum’s website, the fall exhibition will be the first comprehensive examination of Warhol’s Catholic faith in relation to his artistic production. He first was exposed to religious art and iconography in the pews of his neighborhood church, St. John Chrysostom. [ More ]

JEWISH EXPONENT By Selah Maya Zighelboim Grief Painting #30, mixed media on paper, 19” x 24” (Tremain Smith) Philadelphia-based artist Tremain Smith wasn’t sure what to expect when Rabbi Zalman Wircberg, director of the Old City Jewish Arts Center (OCJAC), visited her studio to look at her art, but was still surprised when he asked to see her grief paintings, which she had created after her mother’s death several years before. “They were not something that I had thought that anyone else would particularly be interested in,” said Smith, who isn’t Jewish. “I had put them on my website, just to let people know that I hadn’t disappeared because I had really left my life for a period of time, both my studio and my career and my teaching, and moved in with Mom. That’s what he was interested in.” “The Art of Grief and What Follows” opened at OCJAC on May 3 and runs through June 1. [ More ]

CHRISTIE'S The Medicine Buddha’s gilded surface represents his divinity radiating from within If you’ve ever visited Gump’s department store in San Francisco — a venerable emporium that had traded in luxury goods since 1861 until its closure in 2018 — you might recognise the huge golden figure that towers above Chinese works of art specialist Ruben Lien in the above image. Carved from wood and covered with lacquer and gilt, the sculpture represents the Medicine Buddha. Shortly after its arrival in San Francisco it became the store’s emblem, replacing a Japanese bronze sculpture of the Buddha that the Gump family had given to San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Devan Shimoyama's "Daphne's Prayer” (2016) On Saturday, we celebrated Ernest’s first weeks of walking, since February’s foot injury , with a pedicure and baby blue toenails. He loves it, but this statement of faith, race, and queerness is better expressed in the glittery paintings of Philadelphia-born artist Devan Shimoyama . In his mythological self-portraits like “Daphne's Prayer,” with her eight eyes, the artist both startles and reveres. A solo show of Devan Shimoyama’s allegorical collages recently closed at the Andy Warhol Museum . Buying the  catalog makes Devan Shimoyama our artist of the week .

CATHOLIC PHILLY By Philippe Vaillancourt A necklace with a cross is seen hanging from a 9/11 memorial art piece outside a firehouse near the World Trade Center site in New York Sept. 9. The Quebec government is preparing to adopt what would become the most stringent secularism legislation in Canada, which would prohibit wearing religious symbols, such as a cross, a veil or a kippah, for some people “in the performance of their duties.” (CNS photo/Shannon Stapleton, Reuters) QUEBEC CITY (CNS) — The Quebec government is preparing to adopt what would become the most stringent secularism legislation in Canada, hoping to end more than a decade of acrimonious debates about religion’s place in the public space. Religious groups fear, however, that the legislation will be detrimental to their fundamental rights regarding freedom of worship. Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister of immigration, diversity and inclusion, introduced Bill 21 in the National Assembly of Quebec March 28. The draft pr...

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Michael Walker Pamela Adlon with a wall of paintings by her grandmother Phyllis Leece, some of which appear in her show “Better Things.” LOS ANGELES — Shod in the sort of boots that Sam Fox, her character on “Better Things,” locks in a safe away from her three grasping daughters, Pamela Adlon marches through the art-filled Los Angeles bungalow that is her office and stops before a canvas depicting a woman wearing a fetching expression and not much else. Ms. Adlon launches into the story of how she acquired the painting “Wine Fine” like a punk docent riffing in her own museum. I’ve been collecting since I was 18. I’m friends with Allee Willis, the songwriter — she wrote “September,” “Boogie Wonderland,” the “Friends” theme — and is also an artist. I was her assistant when I was a teenager, and she said [pounding the table] “You’ve got to start collecting art!” [ More ]

BOING BOING Poster by Elżbieta Podlesna of Mary, the mother of Jesus Elżbieta Podlesna could spend up to two years in prison for "offending religious feelings" after putting up posters in Poland showing the Mary and Jesus with LGBT rainbow halos. Police claim that Podlesna, 51, put up the posters in the small city of Płock, Poland. And they say they found even more posters when they searched her car and home. Podlesna was detained by authorities as she returned from an Amnesty International advocacy tour. As a result of the searches, prosecutors are charging her with offending religious feelings. And those charges mean Podlesna faces up to two years in prison if found guilty. [ More ]

ASIAN IMAGE By Umbreen Ali Meet the artist who was inspired to produce Islamic art after suffering from anxiety An artist has spoken of how her career in Islamic art began inadvertently after she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. Zahirah Hafiz, known as Zai, from Manchester said she initially turned to art as a means of coping with her mental health. Zai, 23, said, “My mandala journey starts off at a low point in life when I was suffering with anxiety. I had panic attacks often, I was becoming more and more antisocial and before I knew it, I was completely lost in life. It felt like I had no control over what was happening. Doodling for Zai was a visual representation of her thoughts and feelings. From these creations, Zai went on to produce detailed mandalas which were the catalyst for Life In Detail. [ More ]

ATLAS OBSCURA By Rohini Chaki Kōlam festivals are one of the few remaining opportunities to showcase this slowly fading tradition. BEFORE THE FIRST RAYS OF sunlight stream across the rice fields and mud roads in the Nilgiri Mountains, before they force their way through the high-rises in the urban jungle of Chennai and Madurai, the women of Tamil Nadu are up for the day. In the dark, they clean the threshold to their home, and, following a centuries-long tradition, painstakingly draw beautiful, ritualistic designs called kōlam, using rice flour. But the kōlam is not just a prayer; it is also a metaphor for coexistence with nature. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Joseph Berger Roman Kent, a survivor of Auschwitz, in front of fencing from the Nazi death camp that is part of a large new exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Each weathered piece of history set off a mental reel of flickering images for Roman Kent. The boxcar stationed outside the entrance of the Museum of Jewish Heritage near Battery Park in Manhattan. It looked like the one that had brought him to Auschwitz. On May 8, the museum will open an exhibition to the public that will, unavoidably, also open wounds. Titled “Auschwitz, Not Long Ago, Not Far Away,” it will tell the story of that emblematic death camp, and the Holocaust, with 700 artifacts, most borrowed from Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people were killed, one million of them Jews. [ More ]

SOTHEBY'S An elaborately illustrated Kettabuh, from Corfu, 1790 (Estimated $50,000 - $70,000)  Sotheby’s is pleased to announce the 5 June sale of Important Judaica, Featuring The Serque Collection in New York. Sotheby’s Judaica Department offers Hebrew manuscripts and books, silver, ritual objects and fine arts, including paintings and graphics. Hebrew books and manuscripts generally date from the 15th century to the beginning of the 19th century. Objects for personal ritual and synagogue use, mainly in silver, are also offered in these sales, along with items created at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. Fine art offerings include works by leading Jewish artists such as Isidor Kaufmann, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Edouard Brandon, Maurycy Gottlieb, Solomon Alexander Hart, Marc Chagall, and others from the 19th and 20th centuries. [ More ]

IDEA STREAM By Dave DeOreo & Dan Polletta Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine, late 1200s. Kamakura period (1185–1333) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The current exhibit at The Cleveland Museum of Art - " Shinto: Discovery of The Divine in Japanese Ar t" - has been a long time coming. CMA curator Sinéad Vilbar first got the germ of the idea in 2006. She began working on the exhibit ten years ago while employed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. When Vilbar was hired by CMA in 2014, she brought the show with her as curator of Japanese art. The show finally went on view last month.Many of these works still belong to Buddhist temples or Shinto Shrines in Japan and they have specific festival schedules. [ More ]

THE ART NEWSPAPER By Jerome Bernard In 1964 the parish priest of Saint-Roch in Paris illegally sold the church's chandeliers to an antique dealer. The affair was hushed up by the administrator at the time Wiki Commons In France, churches traditionally belong to the parishes in which they are located, but were placed at the disposal of the clergy by the 1905 law separating Church and State. This dual administration still causes problems for their maintenance and conservation. “A church is designed for worship, it should not be allowed to become a museum”; says Father Bernard Violle, a member of the diocesan commission for religious art in Paris. “The Church tends to assume that liturgical practice should have priority in a monument, we think the opposite”, says Maryvonne de Saint-Pulgent, head of the department dealing with the national heritage at the Ministry of Culture. [ More ]

PADDLE 8 David LaChapelle Poems Of My Soul and Immortality, Hawaii, 2009 'Poems of My Soul and Immortality' was published by the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a non-profit which raises funds for the Museum. The present work honors David LaChapelle, who was awarded the 2012 AFTAM Artist of the Year. David LaChapelle (American, b. 1963) began his career at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and has since become one of the best-known fashion, music, and fine art photographers in the world. Online bidding for this work ended 6 days ago. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Cody Delistraty he British Library’s exhibition “Writing: Making Your Mark” presents 120 objects representing 44 different systems of writing from the past 5,000 years. LONDON — The writing’s on the wall, we’re told. Whether it was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, the invention of the typewriter 300 years later, or the emoji of today’s smartphones, the act of writing seems to be forever on the precipice of extinction, without quite falling off. “Writing has never been static,” said Adrian Edwards, a curator at the British Library who put together the exhibition “Writing: Making Your Mark,” which runs through Aug. 27. “The marks we make on the page have always changed and developed in ways in tune with our needs,” he added. [ More ]

THE YORK READERS BOOK REVIEWS By Antwaun Sargent Devan Shimoyama: Daphne's Prayer, 2016 A reading list for black futurity—what might it contain? The paintings in Devan Shimoyama’s “Shh…,” a small recent show at De Buck Gallery in New York City, offer some recommendations. Each of the six large glittering collages, painted in oil and acrylic and adorned with the artist’s signature rhinestones, sequins, and fabrics, shows a lithe harlequin figure with bejeweled, searching eyes. Devan Shimoyama’s “Cry, Baby” was at the Andy Warhol Museum through March 17, 2019. The catalog, Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby, is published by the Andy Warhol Museum. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Tom Torluemke's "Sickly Decline" (2019) Tom Torluemke is today's Hieronymus Bosch . In his newest exhibition, "Born in the USA" at Chicago's One After 909 gallery , he encourages viewers to see beyond the details into both America's beauty and depravity. He adopts a mural-like style to illustrate badly behaving powerful adults, and also kids in one piece. Despite the brutal impact of the imagery, it is in his meticulous details that the darkness of the images emerge. We must see the shit before we will clean it up, and that's why Tom Torluemke's " Born in the USA " is our art of the week.

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Shivani Vora Ms. Buckman’s wall, clockwise, from top left: a print by Tim Sidell (2014); a portrait by George Hurrell; a portrait of her daughter, Cleo, by thnwblk (2017); a drawing by Toyin Ojih Odutola (2015); art by Cleo; and a vintage image of Krishna and Radha. The artist Zoë Buckman’s loft-cum-studio in Dumbo delivers a sensory overload of paintings, photography and sketches from around the world. Yet Ms. Buckman, born in London, has never thought of herself as a collector. “I’m someone who lives with the work of artists I’ve been lucky enough to know or trade with,” she said on a recent afternoon, as sunlight flooded through the oversized windows overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. Contemporary artists are her favorites. Pieces like these are interspersed with representations of Hindu gods that Ms. Buckman picked up on trips to India, and some art by her daughter, Cleo. [ More ]

RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH Tsherin Sherpa'a "Luxation 1" at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts RICHMOND, Va---"Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment," is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art from April 27 to Aug. 18, 2019. [ More ]