Latest posts by Jonathan Curiel

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 […]

In the wake of every horrific event — including last week’s mass shooting in New Zealand — journalists, analysts, and scholars rush to understand the tragedy’s lead-up. What precipitated it? What were the clues, whether online or somewhere else, that foretold the shocking event? Personal tragedies mirror this same kind of deep soul-searching, as do […]

Composed almost 100 years ago by Duke Ellington and trumpeter Bubber Miley, Black and Tan Fantasy is still a beloved jazz standard, prompting one recent YouTube commenter to call it “one of the most important songs of the 20th century” and another to say, “This needs to be played at my funeral.” The song has […]

In early January, Bay Area artist Mildred Howard spoke at Harvard University about her career and her artwork on display at the school’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art. A few weeks later, Howard was in Norman, Okla., for her retrospective at the University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. And […]

In her video series, Sensation, Minoosh Zomorodinia sets up a camera in various windswept terrains and walks in front of it. Then she wraps her entire body, including her face, in a shiny emergency blanket and waits for the wind to push her. Zomorodinia pushes back. Simply by standing there and resisting — even as the […]

Around the world, people think of one thing when they hear the name “Monet”: water lilies. Lots and lots of water lilies. Claude Monet made more than 200 canvases featuring Nymphaeaceae, which are as closely linked to him as soup cans are to Andy Warhol and dripped paint to Jackson Pollock. Monet first exhibited his […]

When art-goers see Chris Dorley-Brown’s series of East London street scenes called “The Corners,” they often ask if Dorley-Brown staged the images. How couldn’t they be? In one, a woman bends over in the street to fix her shoe while, just behind her, a hatted man looks up at a building — and behind them, […]