Latest posts by Jonathan Curiel

Like every bona fide painter, Ronnie Goodman keeps his artist’s tools nearby. His art, too. But on a recent weekday afternoon, Goodman had all his possessions with him as he positioned himself in a doorway near 16th and Mission streets.  Goodman is an artist who lives on San Francisco’s streets — a street artist in every sense […]

More than three decades after his death, Andy Warhol still commands the art world’s attention. And he still commands the attention of new generations of people — art-goers or not — who become familiar with his best-known works (top of the list: portraits of soup cans) and his best-known utterances, including one he was reported to have said […]

In the pantheon of globally important street artists whose work has changed perceptions of entire peoples, the French artist JR is at the top. For most of the last two decades, in different cities around the world, JR has commandeered buildings, railways, bridges — anything in the street or public realm — to showcase his photos and catch “the attention […]

Like rap albums from the ’90s that warned buyers of “explicit content” or X-rated Hollywood films from the late ’60s that announced “Persons under 16 not admitted,” the new Suzanne Lacy exhibit cautions anyone who’s about to experience it firsthand. In 2019, cultural institutions like SFMOMA and YBCA — which co-host “Suzanne Lacy: We Are […]

Rising almost three stories over Downtown Oakland, Jet Martinez’s calla lilies may be the art world’s biggest. They’re certainly bigger than Diego Rivera’s famous depictions of the white and green flower. They’re bigger than Georgia O’Keeffe’s acclaimed lilies, too. But like O’Keeffe’s and Rivera’s creations, Martinez’s flowers are a guessing game. Does the art have […]

A middle-aged man is standing in front of Camille Utterback’s Precarious, and he’s waving both hands like a magician casting a spell. Next to him is a younger man who’s swaying his hands (and his body) like a Hawaiian hula dancer. Art-goers do the craziest things when they’re around Utterback’s interactive art — and that’s great by […]

Even by the standards of the modern internet, which lets billions of people watch videos of calculated killings and bloodshed, Peter Paul Rubens’ 17th-century painting The Massacre of the Innocents is a tour de force. As soon as you set eyes on it, there’s no place to avoid the brutality and depravity that Rubens depicts in […]

Every day, tens of thousands of people crisscross the intersection of Broadway and 17th streets in Oakland, including commuters who’ve spilled out from BART’s 19th Street station. And when they look up, they see Joshua Mays’ Beacon Frequency Reader, an almost-10-story work that looks over the intersection the way Big Ben looks over London’s Westminster […]

You never go into an art gallery to read. Of course you don’t. The gaze comes first. The visual is everything. But the visual without the visceral amounts to nothing. And whether it’s wall text, a catalogue, or some other format, the written word can push an exhibit into a special visceral stratosphere. So it […]

Anyone who knows the work of street artists Sworne and Ernest Doty knows their “LORDS” references have nothing to do with religion — not in the slightest. The lettering is an acronym for “Legends Of Rare DesignS,” a group of stalwart street artists that includes Sworne and Doty and which has existed in the Bay Area since […]