Month: July 2006

“Where’s the rest of me?” cries the newly amputated Drake McHugh, which was easily Ronald Reagan’s finest performance (that is if you don’t count those sixteen years he spent as a figurehead for California and the U.S.). Based on a scandalous potboiler, Kings Row is the story of “the town they talk about in whispers.”…

Herschel V. Jones, a newspaperman and museum trustee, wowed the art world in 1916 when he donated thousands of prints to the young Institute. This exhibition is curated to offer an overview of techniques and trends in a genre that, because of its affordability, has always cast an eye toward market concerns. Thus the popularity…

Could the Rochester Art Center be aiming to become the Walker Art Center of southern Minnesota? This exhibition of eleven recent works by Manglano-Ovalle, many of them made in the last year, is certainly some kind of coup. The Madrid-born artist uses scientific data and cutting-edge technologies to create minimalist pieces that, conceptually, are quite…

Offering an artistic take on the corporate practice of outsourcing, the collective of curators/artists behind this exhibition (including Douglas Padilla, Xavier Tavera, and Alexa Horochowski) commissioned help from south of the border in making the works on view. As part of Padilla’s installation on a faux business called “Ameri-Art Industries,” there’s a photographic “org-chart” made…

Like his contemporaries Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua explores universal dilemmas that have been at the forefront of debate in his native country for decades. His often controversial views on Israeli identity and culpability have earned him fierce criticism at home and abroad, though he is widely regarded as one of…

When queried about the meaning of his generally surrealistic stories, Haruki Murakami replied, “I’m very realistic. But when I write, I write weird.” That’s true enough, as the writer’s rabid cult of fans could attest. His new collection of twenty-five stories features, among other things, a shrinking elephant, an identity-stealing puddle of quicksand, and a…