Robert Ryman

Untitled (a Grey Drawing), 1962
Wikipedia - "Robert Ryman (born May 30, 1930) is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. The majority of his works feature abstract expressionist-influenced brushwork in white or off-white paint on square canvas or metal surfaces."
Wikipedia, art:21, artnet, art:21 - blog

Yaohong

"Yaohong is a multi-hyphenate. He's a photographer-web designer-programmer-blogger-doodler who can crunch some serious spreadsheets."
Yaohong

Maggie Taylor

Wikipedia - "Maggie Taylor (born 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist who works with digital images. She won the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project Competition in 2004."
Wikipedia, Maggie Taylor, CENTER

Al Kooper

Wikipedia - "Al Kooper (born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt, February 5, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American songwriter, record producer and musician, probably best known for organizing the group Blood, Sweat & Tears, though he did not stay with the group long enough to share its popularity."
Wikipedia, Al Kooper, MOG, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

Garry Kasparov

Wikipedia - "This broke the existing record of youngest World Champion, held for over 20 years by Mikhail Tal, who was 23 when he defeated Mikhail Botvinnik in 1960. Kasparov's win as Black in the 16th game has been recognized as one of the all-time masterpieces in chess history."
Wikipedia, chessgames, Garry Kasparov, BBC - Garry Kasparov jailed over rally

Enrique Martinez Celaya

Wikipedia - "Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist whose work consists of paintings, sculpture, photography, poetry, and prose presented in contexts he calls 'environments.' ... Martínez Celaya uses the human figure in the landscape as a means to explore the nature of human experience and the search for meaning, which dwells in the transient world of time and memory, identity and displacement."
Wikipedia, Enrique Martinez Celaya, La Louver

Ancient Greek

"Athens is the symbol of freedom, art, and democracy in the conscience of the civilized world. The capital of Greece took its name from the goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge."
Ancient Greek, Wikpedia

Castro’s Cuba at 50

TIME - "It's good that the Cuban Revolution's 50th anniversary falls on Jan. 1. That's the day for New Year's resolutions, and it's time for Washington and Havana to make some big ones."
TIME, New York Times, CBS, Wikipedia

Harlem Renaissance

Wikipedia - "Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Across the cultural spectrum (literature, drama, music, visual art, dance) and also in the realm of social thought (sociology, historiography, philosophy), artists and intellectuals found new ways to explore the historical experiences of black America and the contemporary experiences of black life in the urban North."
Wikipedia, Harlem Renaissance, msn, John Carroll, A Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials

Laurie Lipton

"Laurie Lipton was born in New York. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honours). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany and France and has made her home in London since 1986."
Laurie Lipton, MySpace, beinArt

Joseph Beuys

Wikipedia - "He is most famous for his ritualistic public performances and his energetic championing of the healing potential of art and the power of a universal human creativity. As well as performances, Beuys produced sculptures, environments, vitrines, 450 prints and posters, and thousands of drawings."
Wikipedia, WAC, DIA, artnet

Emily Jacir

Wikipedia - "Jacir works in a variety of media including film, photography, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East since 1994, holding solo exhibitions in places including New York, Los Angeles, Ramallah, Beirut, London and Linz."
Wikipedia, Visual Art, Alexander and Bonin, IMEU

The Living Theatre

"During the 1950's and early 1960's in New York, The Living Theatre pioneered the unconventional staging of poetic drama - the plays of American writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth and John Ashbery, as well as European writers rarely produced in America, including Cocteau, Lorca, Brecht and Pirandello."
The Living Theatre, Wikipedia, New York Surveillance Camera Players, YouTube, (1), (2)

George Inness

Hazy Morning, Montclair, New Jersey, 1893
Wikipedia - "His work was influenced, in turn, by that of the old masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, by the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found vivid expression in the work of Inness' maturity. He is best known for these mature works that helped define the Tonalist movement."
Wikipedia, George Inness, artnet, George Inness Virtual Gallery

The Folkways Collection

Smithsonian - "This series of 24 one-hour programs explores the remarkable collection of music, spoken word, and sound recordings that make up Folkways Records (now at the Smithsonian as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)."
The Folkways Collection

Can

Wikipedia - "Can were an experimental rock band formed in West Germany in 1968. One of the most important krautrock groups, Can' incorporated strong minimalist and world music influences."
wikipedia, godfathers of inde, Empty Can Band, YouTube, (1), (2)

Jan Fabre

"Jan Fabre (born 1958, Antwerp, Belgium) is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist, playwright, stage director, choreographer and designer."
Wikipedia, Antopology of a planet, MINDFOOD, Jan Fabre

Charles Baudelaire

"Charles Pierre Baudelaire ...(9 April 1821 - 31 August 1867) was a nineteenth century French poet, critic and translator. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Baudelaire's name has become a byword for literary and artistic decadence."
Wikipedia, poets.org, Charles Baudelaire, Huck Gutman

Wilfred Sätty

"San Francisco visual artist of the 60's and 70's. Here are Interviews, research, clues, events, along the last ten years . . . Here's the story of what happened to me when I met Satty... Two years after he was already physically dead."
Wilfred Sätty

Art From Both Sides of the Berlin Wall

"East German art, like much of what used to be East Germany itself, hasn’t fared altogether well here since the Wall fell. Twenty years on, victorious Westerners, at least those old enough to remember the country divided, still tend to look with contempt on what passed for culture under Communism, as if the two, culture and Communism, were mutually exclusive."
New York Times, Berlin Wall Art, Berlin Wall

Jimmie Durham

"Jimmie Durham is a Cherokee, born in Arkansas in 1940. He is a visual artist, and also a politcal activist for the American Indian Movement and an essayist."
Arte All'arte, Wikipedia, The Saatchi Gallery, Google

Edith Dekynt

"The work of Edith Dekynt deals more than anything else with the aesthetic act. Her research into phenomena is a search for a truth that exists in the invisible or nearly visible. In this way she approaches the infinite, absolute, and unreachable.[cold, dust, humidity, static electricity]." ARTFACTS.NET, Edith Dekynt

Zao Wou-ki

Composition 1965
"Zao Wou-ki, now 82, found his distinctive voice and vocabulary in his mid-thirties, having by that time lived in Paris for a decade."
Marlborough, Wikipedia

Vittorio De Sica

Wikipedia - "Vittorio De Sica (7 July 1901 or 1902–13 November 1974) was a critically acclaimed Italian neorealist director and actor."
Wikipedia, IMDb, strictly film school, YouTube

Double Dee and Steinski

Wikipedia - "Doug DiFranco ("Double Dee") and Steve Stein ("Steinski") were hip-hop producers who achieved notoriety in the early 1980s for a series of underground hip-hop sample-based collages known as the Lessons."
Wikipedia, Steinski, MySpace, last.fm, Steinski - What Does It All Mean?, NPR, Robert Christgau

Hans Op de Beeck

"He became known instantly with a model he created during his time at the Rijksakademie: a crossroads with traffic lights at night. This work is typical in its dealing with a recurring theme of his, that of alienation in modern life and the superficiality, monotony and miscommunication that accompanies it."
RONMANDOS, Hans Op de Beeck, frieze

David Tudor

Wikpedia - "David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music."
Wikipedia, David Tudor, The Getty, (1), Lovely, Sonic Memorial for David Tudor, eMusic, YouTube

Matchboxes from the Subcontinent

Matt Lee - "Collected during my time working from Bangalore, these matchboxes are the tangible memories of my various travels and experiences through India."
Matt Lee, Light of India, flickr

Soviet Army dance ensemble + Run DMC

kottke.org - "Here's the same thing mixed with Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice. Reminds me of the previously featured but still awesome video of Al Minns and Leon James doing the Charleston to Daft Punk."
Soviet Army dance ensemble + Run DMC

Sur le motif: Painting in Nature around 1800

Study of Clouds with a Sunset near Rome, Simon Alexandre-Clément Denis
The Getty - "This exhibition focuses on the practice of painting sur le motif—in nature—as it developed in Europe during the late 1700s and early 1800s."
The Getty

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors

La fenetre
The Metropolitan Museum of Art - "The first exhibition to focus entirely on the radiant late interiors and still lifes of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), the 80 paintings, drawings, and watercolors on display date from the artist’s later years, when he centered his painting activity in his pink stucco house overlooking the Mediterranean in the village of Le Cannet."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikipedia

Richard & Mimi Fariña

"Richard's playing inspired a whole generation of dulcimer players, and Mimi, who was 19 when the album was recorded, developed a beautifully expressive, winsome style on the guitar that complemented Richard's dulcimer perfectly."
Richard & Mimi Fariña, YouTube, (1), (2), Rhapsody

Mark Ruwedel

Kettle Valley #21
Mark Ruwedel - "I am interested in revealing the narratives contained within the landscape and am most attracted to places where the land reveals itself as being both an agent of geological processes and a field of human endeavor."
MoCP, artnet, Mark Ruwedel

The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989

Guggenheim - "This exhibition traces how Asian art, literature, and philosophy were transmitted and transformed within American cultural and intellectual currents, influencing the articulation of new visual and conceptual languages."
Guggenheim, NYT

Theatre of Eternal Music / Dream Syndicate.

La monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jon Hassell, Lee Konitz, David Rosenboom
Wikipedia - "The Theatre of Eternal Music, sometimes later known as The Dream Syndicate, was a mid-sixties musical group formed by LaMonte Young that focused on experimental drone music."
Wikipedia, (1), last.fm, SteveWynn, The Dream Syndicate