Latest posts by Jonathan Curiel

In the summers from 1972 to 1975, as America was experiencing a deep change in attitudes about commercial displays of sex, photographer Susan Meiselas traveled to small towns across New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina to attend carnival shows where women gyrated on stages for horny men. These out-of-the-way performances amid Ferris wheels and pony […]

Anyone who was great friends with Peter Hujar, and that includes writer Fran Lebowitz, encountered the complicated layers that made him such a brilliant and exasperating photographer. Hujar, who died in 1987 of AIDS-related pneumonia, was adventurous, dogged, confident, sensitive, charming, flamboyant, and funny — but prone to fits of anger and insecure about his […]

Standing in rows that extend for almost half a block, Zak Ové’s sculptures’ hands are in the air — not over their heads but by their sides, as if they’re politely surrendering en masse to police. The 40 sculptures are identical — six-feet-five, all made of resin and graphite, all with the same African identity. […]

Like other geographically remote areas — central Congo, eastern Yemen, and eastern Myanmar — China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region cycles through the news because of one thing: bloodshed. China’s conflict stems from the government’s repression of the region’s majority-Muslim people known as Uyghurs, with news photos from the region typically showing Chinese soldiers with weapons […]

For three years, Lauren YS’s Mushroom Eater has draped the outside wall of a SoMa restaurant, Brickhouse Cafe & Saloon. And in those three years, the artist’s life and the city she once called home have changed dramatically, while the mural itself is surprisingly intact. That’s surprising, as Mushroom Eater was only supposed to be […]

In his acclaimed book How to See, the painter, photographer, and writer David Salle argues for risk-taking, or forging ahead with ideas that forgo massive popularity and easy accessibility. That, Salle suggests, can create deeply original artworks that benefit not just the artist but the art-goer. You see this level of originality in his own […]

It’s an orange, plastic barrier designed to keep people from entering the street. It’s also a de facto magnet for stickers and graffiti scrawls — which is why Jay Riggio decided it was the perfect place to attach his sticker work, The Infinite Thoughts of Lara. Riggio spent hours collaging the artwork that morphed into a […]

On the morning of May 19, minutes after SFMOMA’s René Magritte exhibit opened for a member preview, so many people flooded the fourth-floor entrance that a line formed. The newly arriving members stood and waited, surrounded by a sea of reddish, ceiling-high curtains that seemed straight from a Broadway stage.  Magritte loved curtains. He put them in many of […]

Chris Gazaleh has painted Palestinian faces onto an apartment building at 23 Elgin Park St. that overlooks one of San Francisco’s busiest thoroughfares. They’re the faces of the old and the young, of people who seem happy, solemn, and everything in between. Scaffolding and black tarpaulins still rim the building that Gazaleh has worked on for months, but […]

Leonard Cohen was many things in his lifetime: a singer, a poet, a philosopher, a father, and a Buddhist. But he disregarded fixed labels, slogans in his lyrics, and the idea that anything — including a performance — could ever be orchestrated or preordained. As Cohen said in a 2009 interview, seven years before he […]