Naughty, Traditions, and Wood: A 2-part Review of “2015 San Diego Art Prize Exhibition”

Kevin Inman's "Dumpsters at at Sunset Cliffs Parking Area," 2016.

Part 1 of 2 Voyeurism—intense looking—and insurrection are key ingredients that succeed in the current “2015 San Diego Art Prize” exhibition at La Jolla’s Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. The awardees of the 2015 San Diego Visual Arts Network’s (SDVAN) arts prize were Wendy Maruyama and Roy McMakin, who are both artists/furniture makers. Maruyama’s work…

Read More

One Great Art Collector Might Be Your Modest Next Door Neighbor

Walter Pomeroy is a retired, modest salaried General Dynamics employee who built an amazing 400 work art collection. He has quietly lived in a suburban apartment (actually, now, three adjacent apartments) for many years beneath the views and under the radar of wealthier and supposedly more culturally inclined La Jollans of Mount Soledad. The grand…

Read More

Artworks Save Themselves In Central Library Exhibition

Artists can spawn either extraordinary aesthetic objects or spew demonically hilarious irony. Rather than being a noose or an old ball and chain, an artist’s spouse who is also an artist can be either an intellectual collaborator or an intense competitor who can bring-up the other spouse’s own game. “Significant Others” is a robust art…

Read More

Scarce Painting by Famed Artist Vermeer On View in Balboa Park

Johannes Vermeer’s “The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” now on exhibit at the Timken Museum of Art is one of the artist’s very best paintings, but other images and objects included in the boutique exhibition titled “Vermeer” serve to distract rather than enhance the Dutch Baroque masterpiece. With only thirty-five surviving paintings attributed to this baroque master, the odds of normally seeing one of his jewel-like canvases in San Diego are greater than winning the SuperLotto. This is real jackpot!….

Read More

The Klines: My Dinner with Yahweh at La Jolla’s JCC

Michelangelo sculptures, an entire Gothic cathedral made from plain aluminum crutches and huge tacky postcards are all part of an irreverent and provocative but definitely worth seeing exhibition titled “Seeing is Believing: A Reinvention of Articles of Faith” that was curated by 2013 San Diego Art Prize winners Debby and Larry Kline. Now on exhibit at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla, the exhibition is a very odd success due to amazing structure, overtly tacky kitsch, and spectacular failure… (read more…)

Read More