Latest posts by Jonathan Curiel

Jazz is a multi-sensory art form; seeing jazz can be just as important as hearing it. That’s why Jim Marshall’s iconic photographs of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and other jazz stalwarts — which occupy the outer windows of an old three-story building across from the SFJAZZ Center — are so appealing. So appealing, in […]

Trevor Paglen is sitting on a curb in Altman Siegel’s parking lot, smoking and puffing away as he takes a break from installing his new exhibit at the gallery. The smoke rises and swirls into the air as Paglen takes another puff. And another. Wearing a dark hoodie and T-shirt under a leather jacket, and […]

In August 2016, members of the art-activist collective INDECLINE put up a grotesque Donald Trump statue, The Emperor Has No Balls, in the Castro — one of several similar anti-Trump works that the group erected around the United States. Most recently, INDECLINE changed a gun-oriented Las Vegas billboard into an anti-gun and anti-NRA advertisement with […]

Quite by accident, Ken Lum created one of Europe’s most recognizable public art pieces. The year was 1990, and Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art wanted an outdoor billboard to advertise Lum’s inaugural exhibit. Lum convinced them to hang a copy of an exhibit work that blared the words “Melly Shum Hates Her Job.” […]

When the Portuguese street artist Bordalo II came to San Francisco for his “Trashedy” exhibit at Heron Arts — his first solo show in the United States — he planned to use Bay Area recyclables to make new animal pieces. And that’s what Bordalo II did, going to recycling centers in the East Bay to […]

In an interview for the 2010 book Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians, comedian George Carlin said “fucking” is a word that — in the right hands — can add “punch” and “effect” to a joke. People who walk by the Bound Together anarchist collective bookstore on Haight Street see Carlin’s word a lot on the store’s […]

On a recent Thursday morning, British filmmaker John Akomfrah stood on SFMOMA’s seventh floor as art-goers exited from a screening of his film Vertigo Sea. Akomfrah’s 48-minute work is a tour de force, a three-channel video that narrates the bloody history of whale-hunting, the slave trade, and other practices that relate to seafaring, including colonialism, […]

Art exhibits that spotlight rugs — like last year’s acclaimed Metropolitan show in New York, “Carpets for Kings: Six Masterpieces of Iranian Weaving” — are usually surreal because they treat the works as beautiful objects to stare at. Touching those carpets, a tactile sensation that’s an intrinsic part of the normal rug experience, is absolutely forbidden — […]

First and foremost, Bill Fontana describes himself as a “composer.” It’s true, except Fontana doesn’t do traditional scores. He’s not like J.S. Bach or Antonio Vivaldi or even Philip Glass, whose sheet music you can buy and download and perform on your own. Nope. Fontana is a composer in the original Latin sense of the word, […]

The man who Jorit Agoch painted last year on an Olive Street wall looks like Jonathan Goldsmith’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” character who touted Dos Equis beer. But Agoch’s figure doesn’t hobnob and socialize in the upper stratas. He is a homeless man who’s struggling to get his basic needs met — the […]