Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild 2005
"Richter officially began painting in 1962. Here we give you access to his various works, ranging from oils on canvas to overpainted photographs, and including the historical reference of photographs, 'Atlas'."
Gerhard Richter, Wikipedia, SFMOMA

Kronos Quartet

"For more than 30 years, the Kronos Quartet—David Harrington, John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola) and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello)—has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet."
Kronos Quartet, Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East

Ghost, Kader Attia
TimesOnline - "Now he has put together an exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle East which contains elements that could provoke dramatically hostile reactions from Muslim fundamentalist quarters."
The Saatchi Gallery

Nancy Graves

Rheo, 1975
Wikipedia - "Nancy Graves (December 23, 1939 – October 21, 1995) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime-filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the moon."
Wikipedia, Nancy Graves Foundation, artnet

Daniel Pitin

Behind the House
"Daniel Pitin choses as the subject of his paintings film stills not for the story they tell but for the gestures and expressions of its protagonists - movement and gestures are what interest Pitin and more often than not these are pained and violent."
hunt kastner, artnews

American folk music revival

1952, Anthology of American Folk Music
Wikipedia - "The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States in the 1950s to mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, of course, since traditional folk music has thousands of years of history, and performers like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in decades prior to the 1950s."
Wikipedia, The Field Recorders' Collective, npr, The 111 Greatest Acts of the Anglo-American
Folk Music Tradition

Brassaï

Wikipedia - "Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (9 September 1899 – 8 July 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to fame in France."
Wikipedia, Brassai, PROFOTOS

Visual Poetry Today

One Inch Square Text, Peter Finch
Geof Huth - "The child of both poetry and the visual arts, visual poetry has a double set of interests and its forms are myriad. Some visual poets continue to write traditional poems that require a certain visual context in which to properly mean—a context so important that it serves as a critical component of a unified text."
Poetry Foundation, Wikipedia, vispoets, derek beaulieu, EPC, Joel Lipman, (1), The New Post-literate, To be looked over, not to be overlooked

Spike Lee

IMDb - "Spike Lee was born Shelton Lee in 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from a proud and intelligent background. His father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a school teacher. His mother dubbed him Spike, due to his tough nature."
IMDb, Wikipedia, Google

Jules Breton

Calling in the Gleaners
Rehs Galleries - "As one of the primary painters of peasant themes in the nineteenth century, and an artist strongly influenced by his own native traditions from northern France, Jules Breton’s reputation rivaled that of Eugène Delacroix or Jean-Dominique Ingres at the time of his death in 1906."
Rehs Galleries , Wikipedia, Google

Rail transport

Georgetown Loop Railroad 2. John Leyba
Wikipedia - "Rail transport is the conveyance of passengers and goods by means of wheeled vehicles running along railways or railroads. Rail transport is part of the logistics chain, which facilitates International trade and economic growth in most countries."
Wikipedia

Playing The Beatles Backwards

"23. Rain. You could tell a masterpiece like Revolver was just around the corner when a song as wondrous as 'Rain' was being released as a B-side. The Beatles were entering a phase where their songs remained accessible even as the experimentation inherent within them was becoming increasingly evident."
JB HOME

Katharina Sieverding

Transformer
P.S.1 MoMA - "Sieverding firmly believes that the responsibility of the artist is to act as a politically engaged being, absorbing, synthesizing, and commenting on the rapid advancement of our technology-driven age.
P.S.1, artnet, Art Facts Net

Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Wikipedia - "The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 ... was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the Stalinist government of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956."
Wikipedia, The Library of Congress, 1956 Hungarian Revolution

Art Nouveau, 1890-1914

Riga
" Art Nouveau, 1890-1914, explores a new style in the visual arts and architecture that developed in Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth century."
National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia, ArtLex, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rachel Whiteread

Place, (Village), 2006-08

Wikipedia - "She is probably best known for Ghost, a large plaster cast of the inside of a room in a Victorian house, and for her resin sculpture for the empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square."
Wikipedia, Rachel Whiteread, Turner Prize, Gooogle

Winged Victory of Samothrace

Wikipedia - "The winged goddess of Victory standing on the prow of a ship overlooked the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace. This monument was probably an ex-voto offered by the people of Rhodes in commemoration of a naval victory in the early second century BC."
Louvre, Wikipedia

Don McLean

Wikipedia - "Don McLean's most famous composition, 'American Pie', is a sprawling, impressionistic ballad inspired partly by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) in a plane crash in 1959."
Wikipedia, Google, Dailymotion

David Creedon

Karen Day - "Ireland's sluggish economy and stifling religious regime during the 1950s left the country with severe emigration issues. Many families abandoned their homes never to return. Irish photographer David Creedon examines these dilapidated houses and forgotten stories of the people who once occupied them with his series of photographs, Ghosts of the Faithful Departed, taken between 2005 and 2007."
Cool Hunting, David Creedon

Bill Wittliff

"Called 'a poet of the ordinary' by the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter's haunting, enigmatic photographs have been widely exhibited in Europe, The U.S., and Latin America."
Bill Wittliff

George Clinton

Wikipedia - "George Clinton (born July 22, 1941) is an American musician and the principal architect of P-Funk. He was the mastermind of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic during the 1970s and early 1980s, and was a solo funk artist as of 1981. He has been called one of the most important innovators of funk music, next to James Brown and Sly Stone."
Wikipedia, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

Huma Mulji

Wikipedia - "Huma Mulji (born 1970) is an artist based in Lahore. Mulji was born in Karachi. Her sculpture and photography discuss identity through the metaphor of travel and the freedom it affords for self-exploration."
Wikipedia, Huma Mulji

Pelé

Wikipedia - "Edison (Edson) Arantes do Nascimento,... (born 23 October 1940), best known by his nickname Pelé is a Brazilian former football player, rated by many as the greatest footballer of all time."
Wikipedia, FIFA, The TIME 100, YouTube, (1)

Gloomy Sunday

Wikipedia - "'Gloomy Sunday' (from Hungarian 'Szomorú vasárnap', ...) is a song written by László Jávor and set to music in 1933 by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress, in which the singer mourns the untimely death of a lover and contemplates suicide."
Wikipedia, Gloomy Sunday, YouTube, Diamanda Galas, Sarah McLachlan, Ray Charles, Bjork, Paul Robeson, Kronos Quartet, Edvin Marton

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Wikipedia - "Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies."
Wikipedia, Poets, YouTube

Julee Cruise

Wikipedia - "Julee Cruise (born 1 December 1956, in Creston, Iowa) is an American singer, and actress. With a distinctive, airy voice, Cruise has recorded three albums, but is probably best known for the lead vocal on 'Falling,' the theme song for the cult U.S. television series Twin Peaks."
Wikipedia, MySpace, Julee Cruise, YouTube

Martha Graham

"The Martha Graham Dance Company, founded by Martha Graham in 1926, is the oldest, most celebrated modern dance company in the world. It presents the classic Graham repertory and new choreography in its home city of New York and on tour, featuring an international roster of today's most talented dance artists."
Center of Contemporary Dance, Wikipedia, PBS, YouTube

Mike Chisholm

Pentagonal Pool
"Mike Chisholm was born in 1954 in Stevenage New Town (thirty miles north of London, England). He began a serious involvement with photography about fifteen years ago, building on an interest in printmaking. He is also interested in designing and making books and CDs."
Mike Chisholm

Robert Capa

Wikipedia - "Robert Capa (Budapest, October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) was born Andre Friedmann. A self-proclaimed 'photo-journalist,' he was a 20th century combat photographer who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War."
Wikipedia, PBS

José Clemente Orozco

La Trinchera
Wikipedia- "José Clemente Orozco (November 23, 1883 – September 7, 1949) was a Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and others."
Wikipedia, PBS, WFU

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto - "I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision."
Hiroshi Sugimoto

Barack Obama

"The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents."
NYTimes, Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, MySpace, CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, BBC

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity."
American Rhetoric, (1), Martin Luther King, Jr., Research & Education Institute, Martin Luther King, Jr., MLK Online, NYTimes. Democracy Now!

Vik Muniz

Wikipedia - "Vik Muniz made two detailed replicas of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa: one out of jelly and the other out of peanut butter. He has also worked in sugar, wire, thread, and Bosco Chocolate Syrup, out of which he produced a recreation of Leonardo's Last Supper."
Wikipedia, Vik Muniz, artnet, PBS

Charles Olson

Wikipedia - "Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970), was an important 2nd generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance."
Wikipedia, EPC, Modern American Poetry, The Charles Olson Research Collection, Other Poets, Looking For Oneself, YouTube, Polis Is This