Vasily Kamensky

"Tango with Cows takes its title from a book and poem by the Russian avant-garde poet Vasily Kamensky. The absurd image of farm animals dancing the tango evokes the clash in Russia between a primarily rural culture and a growing urban life."
The Getty, PENNSOUND, Wikipedia

Keith Coventry

Afternoon Brass
"His abstract and narrative paintings contrast a powerful surface allure with the derelict, the degraded, the decay and decline of their subject matter."
Saatchi, artnet, frieze

Bird Songs

"Songs and calls of some New York State birds.'Speak, cry, warble, call, speak each one according to your variety, each, according to your kind.' Popol Vuh I."
SUNY

Burning Spear

Wikipedia - "Burning Spear is one of the strongest proponents of Marcus Garvey's self-determination and self-reliance for all African descendants, thus leading to several album releases in commemoration of the Jamaican activist."
Wikipedia, Burning Spear, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), veoh

Gerhard Richter

4,096 Colors, 1974
Wikipedia - "Richter has stated that the use of photographic imagery as a starting point for his early paintings resulted from an attempt to escape the complicated process of deciding what to paint, along with the critical and theoretical implications accompanying such decisions within the context of a modernist discourse."
Wikipedia, Gerhard Richter, YouTube

“Portugal Is Not a Small Country”

"Yet Portugal is loath to think of itself as a small country. Or at least it was, before its overseas empire collapsed. Built up over centuries of exploration, trade and colonisation, the Portuguese Empire once spanned four continents. The jewel in its crown was Brazil, but Portugal lost control over its South American colony in 1822."
Strange Maps

Napoleon III and Paris

"This dossier photography exhibition will focus on the changing shape of Paris during the Second Empire, when the city’s narrow streets and medieval buildings gave way to the broad boulevards and grand public works that still define the urban landscape of the French capital."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYT

John Wood

"John Wood (born 1922) has consistently challenged traditional photography, often incorporating painting, drawing, and collage as well as cliché verre, solarization, and offset lithography."
John Wood, artdaily

Robert Altman

Wikipedia - "Robert Bernard Altman (20 February 1925 – 20 November 2006) was an American film director known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective."
Wikipedia, IMDb, Robert Altman Photography, senses of cinema, NYT

Pam Glew

"Pam Glew, born in 1978, is a contemporary British artist who uses unique bleaching techniques with vintage fabrics and flags to create her strong cinematic paintings."
Pam Glew, flickr

The Easybeats

Wikipedia - "The Easybeats were a rock and roll band from Australia. They formed in Sydney in late 1964 and split at the end of 1969. They are widely regarded as the greatest Australian pop band of the 1960s and were the first Australian rock and roll act to score an international pop hit with their classic 1966 single 'Friday on My Mind'."
Wikipedia, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2),

Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada

Wikipedia - "Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is a Cuban-American contemporary artist. He was born in Cuba and grew up in the United States. He became a founding member of the culture jamming movement in New York City in the early 1990s, first with the group Artfux and later with the group Cicada Corps of Artists."
Wikipedia, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, NY ARTS, Wooster Collective

Lucas Samaras

Self Portrait, 1973
"Over the years, Samaras has created drawings, furniture, jewelry, paintings, photographs, sculpture and room-sized installation using a variety of material including beads, chicken wire, clay, Cor-ten steel, fabric, mirrors, pastel, pencil, pins, plaster and oil."
Pace Wildenstein, The Getty, Lucas Samaras Interview

Flower Mound Observatory

"During the course of developing the skills needed to be a good astro-photographer sometimes it becomes necessary to take the law into your own hands and build what you need. Not everything out there is tailor made these days to fit your exact application."
Flower Mound Observatory

Vera Lutter

"Vera Lutter, with the help of The Print Center and Amtrak, positioned a custom-made 8-by-16 foot camera obscura on the northwest corner of the second floor of the Amtrak parking garage at 30th Street Train Station."
The Print Center, galerie xippas 06_2009 spaces

Peter Gordon

"Young composers, taking their cue from La Monte Young, Terry Riley and others, were using simple tonal materials -- sometimes as a drone, sometimes with a palpable pulse -- to create a new kind of art music, one that used amplification (sometimes, though not always, at high levels) and borrowed from Asian, Indian, and (often uncredited) African music traditions."
MySpace, (1), PETER GORDON, Lovely, YouTube, (1), (2)

World Digital Library

1562, Diego Gutierrez, Spain
"The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings."
World Digital Library

Louis le Brocquy

Army Massing, Louis le Brocquy
Wikipedia - "In 1967 Louis le Brocquy was commissioned by the publisher Liam Miller to illustrate Thomas Kinsella's inspired version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the dramatic record of Ireland's proto-historic past."
Wikipedia, The Táin lithographs, 1969

Compass in Hand

Peter Doig. Camp Forestia, 1996
"The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, acquired by the Museum in 2005, is an extraordinary collection of over 2,500 contemporary works on paper."
MoMA, 1

Ofra Haza

Wikipedia - "As her career progressed, the multi-lingual Haza was able to switch between traditional and more commercial singing styles without jeopardising her credibility. The music, too, fused elements of Eastern and Western instrumentation, orchestration and dance-beat."
Wikipedia, The Jerusalem Post, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

Nick Cobbing

"Nick Cobbing (b 1967) is a photojournalist and photographic artist, currently living in the UK. His work focuses primarily on landscape and humankind's changing relationship with the natural world."
Nick Cobbing

The Seen And The Hidden: (Dis)Covering The Veil

Courtesy of Austrian Cultural Forum.

"The woman's veil is one of the most symbolically charged pieces of clothing in contemporary dress; it is provocative even when it is not revealing. With roots in the three Abrahamic religions, it has become one of the most visible icons of contemporary Islam."
e-flux, NYT

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux, 1881–82
"Between 1914 and 1919, Henry Clay Frick acquired twenty works by James McNeill Whistler: five paintings, three pastels, and twelve prints, a remarkable ensemble that represents the breadth of Whistler’s artistic activity and testifies to Frick’s taste as a collector."
Portraits, Pastels, Prints: Whistler in The Frick Collection

Travel Posters

Boston Public Library

Tabu Ley Rochereau

Wikipedia - "Tabu Ley Rochereau (born 1940) is the leader of Orchestre Afrisa International and one of Africa's most influential vocalists and prolific songwriters. Along with guitarist Dr Nico Kasanda, Tabu Ley pioneered soukous; he internationalised his music by fusing elements of Congolese folk music with Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American rumba."
Wikipedia, Rhapsody, National Geographic Society, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Gregory Bateson

Wikipedia - "Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields."
Wikipedia, OIKOS, Edge, The Institute for Intercultural Studies

Lindsay Seers

"I could say that I was in love with her, but it was not in an ordinary sense. I was consumed by her, so that it became painful. I wanted to merge with her entirely, to become her."
Matt's Gallery, More Milk Yvette, CIRCA, GASWORKS

Steidle Collection of American Industrial Art

Industry -- East Latrobe, 1936
"This exhibition of 46 paintings and in works on paper captures aspects of America at its industrial peak between the world wars and allows the viewer to examine the industrial heritage of this region."
Westmoreland Museum of American Art, PDF, Current Research on the Art of Industry Artists at Work: Imaging Place, Work, and Process - Betsy Fahlman

Leonard Cohen - BBC 1988

"The film, originally produced by the BBC in 1988, is a full-length concert intervowen with interview footage shot in Athens, Hydra and New York plus rare and rarely seen documentary footage of Leonard’s childhood and early career. The music comes from Cohen's I'm Your Man tour of 1988."
BBC video documentary, YouTube - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Exploring the Early Americas

"Exploring the Early Americas features selections from the more than 3,000 rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress."
LOC

Minutemen

Wikipedia - "The Minutemen were an American punk rock band formed in San Pedro, California in 1980. Comprising guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley, the Minutemen recorded four albums and eight EPs before Boon's unexpected death in December 1985."
Wikipedia, KFTH, MySpace, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

Jiri Georg Dokoupil

Manchas y Rabos, 2000
"Jiri Georg Dokoupil was born in 1954 in Krnov, then Czechoslovakia, and in the seventies he studied fine art in Cologne, Frankfurt and New York. In 1982 he had one-man exhibitions in Cologne, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Paris."
Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, artnet

dr.d

"dr.d / drd (doctored) subverted. The official site, whatever that means. Around 1999 after reading No Logo by Naomi Klein, in particular the bit about Ron English changing billboards with paint alterations, it occurred to me that I could do something similar."
dr.d, flickr

Readers’ Portraits of President Obama

NYT - "Randy Kennedy wrote in The Times that President Obama has captured the imagination of artists worldwide, and many are finding an audience online. ArtsBeat asked readers to submit their own Obama-inspired art."
NYT

Via Aurelia: The Roman Empire's Lost Highway

Fresque Mithra Doura Europos
"At first glance, it didn't appear that impressive: a worn limestone pillar, six feet high and two feet wide, standing slightly askew beside a country road near the village of Pélissanne in southern France."
Smithsonian, Wikipedia

The Cloud Appreciation Society

"At The Cloud Appreciation Society we love clouds, we’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them. Read our manifesto and see how we are fighting the banality of ‘blue-sky thinking’."
The Cloud Appreciation Society

Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen

NYT - "Twenty years ago, on June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square."
NYT, PBS, Wikipedia, Google, BBC

Dan's Topical Stamps

The Limburg Split of 1839
"You can browse my collections, or locate a particular stamp in the Catalog using Scott Catalog numbers. (Michel and Stanley Gibbons catalog numbers are included for most of the map stamps.) Some stamps appear more than once, and they are listed more than once."
Dan's Topical Stamps

Osvaldo Pugliese

Wikipedia - "Osvaldo Pedro Pugliese (Buenos Aires, December 2, 1905 - July 25, 1995) was an Argentine tango musician. He developed dramatic arrangements that retained strong elements of the walking beat of salon tango but also heralded the development of concert-style tango music."
Wikipedia, TODO Tango, ToTANGO, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2)

London Shop Fronts

"Emily sends in the London Shop Fronts blog, 'a daily photo blog of shop fronts in London. This is an archive of the disappearing independent shops in London and a view of interesting and sometimes worrying typography and design choices of small retailers'."
London Shop Fronts

City Island, Seaport of the Bronx

NYT - "To cross the City Island Bridge — 'Welcome to City Island, Seaport of the Bronx' — is to enter an anomaly: a small town that lives within the borders of a great metropolis, an active fishing village with a 718 area code." NYT - "Fresh Fish and Characters", Wikipedia, VOICE, City Island Museum

Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin

"In the early days of cinema, before the rise of the Hollywood studios with their artificial, controlled environments in the form of sets and sound stages, movies took advantage of real locations as narrative backdrops."
bright lights, Morris Engel, Images, Photographs

Underground press

Wikipedia - "The phrase underground press is most often used to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It also refers to illegal publications under oppressive governments, for example, the samizdat and bibuła."
Wikipedia, Voices from the Underground, ZINE WORLD, The Underground Press

Andrei Tarkovsky

Wikipedia - "Tarkovsky is listed among the 100 most critically acclaimed film directors; director Ingmar Bergman was quoted as saying 'Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream'."
Wikipedia, IMDb, Nostalghia, senses of cinema, strictly film school, viddler, YouTube, (1), (2)

Sly Stone

Wikipedia - "Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart on 15 March 1943, in Denton, Texas) is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer, most famous for his role as frontman for Sly & the Family Stone, a band which played a critical role in the development of soul, funk and psychedelia in the 1960s and 1970s. Sly & the Family Stone was started in San Francisco, California."
Wikipedia, (1), Sly Stone, Backstage, VANITY FAIR, KCRW. YouTube - Dick Cavett, (1). YouTube - Mike Douglas Show, (1), (2). YouTube, (1), (2), (3).

Hugo Werner

Being Abroad
"Since 2004, Hugo Werner has been lecturing typography, motion graphics and creative process as a faculty member of FUMEC University and UEMG - Design School, in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil."
Hugo Werner, Art+Culture

A. M. Rousseau.

Wrapped Figure, From Interior Light, 1999
"I am an artist and a photographer whose work for many years centered around the subject of homelessness in America, particularly as it impacted on the lives of women."
Ann Marie Rousseau, A.M.Rousseau Fine Art

Morton Feldman

Wikipedia - "Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer, born in New York City. A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman went through several compositional phases. He was a pioneer in aleatoric music and indeterminate music, and in music requiring improvisation. His works are characterized by quietness, slowness, and often by their extreme length, especially in his later music."
Wikipedia, Morton Feldman Page, last.fm, New Albion, The New Yorker, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Aspen - The multimedia magazine in a box

"This is a web version of Aspen, a multimedia magazine of the arts published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards — one issue even included a spool of Super-8 movie film. It's all here."
Aspen - Phyllis Johnson, Index to Aspen

Long Lake, New York

Wikipedia - "The town is entirely within the Adirondack Park and is the most northerly town in the county. It is a summer tourism destination offering fishing, hiking, boating, and many other outdoor activities. In the winter months, snowmobiling is also popular. Long Lake is also the home of the historic Adirondack Hotel and Helms Aero Service, floatplane service."
Wikipedia, W - Floatplane, Lake Eaton, HELMS AERO SERVICE