Spiral Bound at National University
Spiral Bound opens at 214a Gallery, a new gallery space on the La Mesa campus of National University. The exhibition presents notebooks by forty artists — twenty from New York, twenty from San Diego — in a wide array of media: video, yellow legal pads, leather-bound journals, and loose sheets of paper aspiring to codex...
Social Sculpture
Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate is arguably the most successful public artwork in the United States today. It draws the same number of annual visitors as the Statue of Liberty and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, yet derives its appeal solely through aesthetic pleasure not historical content. In short, it’s a people magnet. Accounts of the work...
David Fobes at Athenaeum
David Fobes‘s show at the Athenaeum is titled Code-O-Chromes, signaling its delicious conflation of color, op, painting, quilting, and CGI. (A conflation so rich one hapless critic panned the show for asserting that “painting is dead,” when in fact it contains two works rendered in… paint.) The key to the show — and the...
Trolley Dancing
Trolley Dances is authentic homegrown San Diego culture: an annual event of site-specific dances linked together by the city’s light rail system. Like San Diego’s other indigenous art forms — surfing, sailing, scuba — Trolley Dances is site-specific in a larger sense by happening mostly outdoors, and in environments far less organized and more dynamic...
Coatlicue Mi Amor
Half-consciously, though, there is the more indigenous dream that the adventure is everything… — Kaprow, Happenings in the New York Scene Last month Agitprop presented Coatlicue mi Amor, a performance by The Border Corps, a group of San Diego artists, musicians, and performers. In its density of information and feeling, Coatlicue was by far...
Machine Project at LACMA
Machine Project is a Los Angeles based non-profit arts organization, a storefront exhibition space, and purveyor of DIY workshops in the spirit of the Maker Faire. LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago, and a patchwork complex of seven buildings ranging in style from 30′s streamline...
Urban Homestead
Housing being too expensive in San Diego, I set out to realize my lifelong dream of homeownership. The first step was finding a suitable plot of land, the criteria being location, location, and location. I wanted great views, rural ambience, quick freeway access, and walking distance to UCSD and the beach. Happily a solution quickly...
Architecture of Hope
One of the big surprises of the 2007 San Diego wildfires was the instant rise to international fame of Qualcomm Stadium as shelter, haven, and general beacon of humanity for tens of thousands of refugees. Photojournalists the world over descended on San Diego, and their collective photographer’s eye discovered a little-known fact: the Stadium is...