Latest posts by Jonathan Curiel

After artist Shiva Ahmadi made her first animation, Lotus, in 2014, she swore she’d never repeat that laborious process. Instead, she’d focus completely on the painting, watercolors, and sculpture that had previously made her name in the art world. Alan Kurdi and the plight of Syrian refugees changed everything. Kurdi was the 3-year-old Syrian boy […]

British artist Haroon Mirza and the Asian Art Museum go out of their way to contextualize Mirza’s new San Francisco exhibit. They post wall text that explains why many orthodox Muslims view music as forbidden. They display an 18th-century Indian painting from the museum’s collection that depicts the prophet Muhammad in a cave where he […]

Judy Dater leads public tours of her life’s work at the de Young Museum all the time. Since April, avid fans have joined the outings, as have people less familiar with Dater’s photographs — but they all seem to know her best-known image: Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite, a 1974 photo in which an elderly (and […]

The Orlando nightclub massacre on June 12, 2016, that killed dozens of people — and the bevy of mass shootings before and after that day — prompted a national debate about the availability of weapons, and the reasons for so many shootings. They also prompted San Francisco artist Erin Feller to make a mural in […]

For the better part of a century, a who’s-who of American photographers — including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston — have chronicled the landscape of the American West, publishing images that have mythologized its contours of land, mountains, and skyline. Adams’ Yosemite photos are still breathtaking. Same for Weston’s images of rock faces in Monterey […]

Tour buses regularly pull up to Hank Cancel’s apartment so people can take photos of his windows. At least one popular guide book — for German-speaking guidebook to San Francisco and California — directs readers to Cancel’s building. And why not? Nowhere else in San Francisco are there street-facing windows that feature a parade of […]

The artistic language that Ben Aronson and Phillip Maisel speak in their respective works is one grounded in the truth and another in an alternative reality that requires a visual leap of faith. For Aronson’s paintings, that leap is toward an expanse of light and shadow, where the urban landscape — buildings, hills, skylines, and the […]

The photos that Kudzanai Chiurai created for his “Revelations” series are like comical Hollywood stage sets. The African actors in each scene glisten with sweat and their characters have exaggerated expressions that suggest corruption, conniving, or some kind of excess. Chiurai depicts scenes from a decolonized, liberated Africa where the “rebirth” that Nelson Mandela championed […]

Tuzuri Watu, 4900 Third St. (near Palou Avenue) Lenora LeVon, 4901 Third St. (near Palou Avenue) The street art near the intersection of Palou Avenue and Third Street is a microcosm of the Bayview district’s past and present. Near the southwest corner is Brooke Fancher’s Tuzuri Watu, an epic mural Fancher created 30 years ago with the […]

The influences that Jason Jägel brings to his artwork include a who’s-who of eclecticism, among them painter Philip Guston, artist Bruce Conner, cartoonist Chris Ware, singer Dudley Perkins, writer Haruki Murakami, director-animator Hayao Miyazaki, and a long list of others who, if you look closely at Mr. Foggy’s Neighborhood, might be apparent. But Jägel is […]