A lot of good new shows
Gallery Night this fall drew big crowds. Most people credited the marvelous weather, but top-notch shows had something to do with it, too. Artisan Gallery 218 assembled a busy show [...]
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Posted November 02, 2016in Art News
Posted October 05, 2016in Art News
Streets, guns and artists
Three exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center present intermingled insights on guns, streets, documentarians and artists. The shows are relatively unheralded. The main attraction featured a recently discovered dead [...]
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Posted August 31, 2016in Art News
Ladies’ month in the art scene
Perhaps because, as Picasso remarked, artists are children who never grow up, the art world marks time to a school year calendar. Summer is for vacation, frivolity and fairs. September [...]
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Posted August 10, 2016in Art News
American mirth
Things are looking a bit more like business as usual again at Steven Vail Fine Arts. The second-floor gallery in the Teachout Building was inaccessible for weeks because of crime [...]
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Posted July 27, 2016in Art News
Still relevant
Jordan Weber is one of the lucky artists to whom the perfect time comes. His art had long been dealing with African-American stereotypes and subject matter before Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton [...]
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Posted June 15, 2016in Art News
Far from the madding crowd estimates
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said there are three kinds of lies — “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” Mark Twain liked the quote so much he stole it. Summertime in [...]
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Posted May 25, 2016in Art News
Glenn Brown — past is prologue
“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” — William Faulkner “Glenn Brown” opened at the Des Moines Art Center last week and plays through August 28. [...]
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Posted April 20, 2016in Art News
Gone to look for America
Losing gamblers like to say it’s “better to be lucky than good.” Actuarial scientists, who have refined the business of odds making, prefer saying “luck is short term.” It’s [...]
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Posted March 16, 2016in Art News
Artistic hubris plus lawyers
Art depends upon the hubris of artists. For much of history, the tyranny of religion made the very idea of portraying a holy image so risky that only the bravest, [...]
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Posted February 24, 2016in Art News
The enduring and the ephemeral
Two exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center demonstrate polar qualities of art — the enduring and the ephemeral. “Arts & Letters,” through May 1 in the Anna Meredith Gallery, [...]
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